Isabel’s friends. “It brings all sorts of people together, doesn’t it? Simple. They don’t have to like each other.”
“ T H E P Y R E N E E S,” said Isabel suddenly.
Both Toby and Cat stared at her.
“Yes,” Isabel continued airily. “The Pyrenees. Do you know that I have never been to the Pyrenees? Not once.”
“I have,” said Toby.
“I haven’t,” said Cat. “But I would like to go.”
“We could go together,” Isabel pressed on, adding, “and Toby, too, of course, if you wanted to come, Toby. We could all go climbing. Toby would lead the way and we would all be roped to him. We’d be so safe.”
Cat laughed. “He’d slip, and then we’d all fall to our deaths . . .” She stopped herself suddenly. The remark had come out without her thinking of it, and now she glanced at Isabel apologetically. The whole point of the evening was to take her aunt’s mind off what had happened in the Usher Hall.
“The Andes,” Isabel said brightly. “Now, I have been to the Andes. And they’re just magnificent. But I could hardly breathe, you know, they are so high.”
“I went to the Andes once,” Toby chipped in. “At university.
Our climbing club went. One of the guys slipped and fell. Five hundred feet, if not more.”
There was a silence. Toby looked into his glass, remembering. Cat studied the ceiling.
*
*
*
4 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h A F T E R H E R G U E S T S had gone, leaving earlier than anticipated, Isabel stood in the middle of the kitchen and stared at the plates stacked above the dishwasher. The evening had not been a conspicuous success. The conversation had picked up slightly over the dinner table, but Toby had gone on at great length about wine—his father was a successful wine importer and Toby worked in the family firm. Isabel saw the way he sniffed at the wine she had poured him, thinking that she might not notice—but she did.
There was nothing wrong with it, surely; an Australian cabernet sauvignon, not a cheap one; but then wine people were suspicious of New World wines. Whatever they said to the contrary, there was an ineradicable snobbery in the wine world, with the French in the lead, and she imagined that Toby thought she knew no better than to serve a supermarket red. In fact, she knew more than most about wine, and there was nothing wrong with what she had served.
“Australian,” he had said simply. “South Australian.”
“Rather nice,” said Cat.
Toby ignored her. “Quite a bit of fruit.”
Isabel looked at him politely. “Of course, you’ll be used to better.”
“Good heavens,” said Toby. “You make me sound like a snob.
This is perfectly . . . perfectly all right stuff. Nothing wrong with it.”
He put down his glass. “We had a superb first-growth claret in the office the other day. You wouldn’t believe it. The old man fished it out from somewhere. Covered in dust. It faded pretty quickly, but if you took it before it faded, my God!”
Isabel had listened politely. She felt slightly cheered by his performance as she thought that Cat would be bound to tire of this sort of talk, and of Toby with it. Boredom would set in sooner rather than later, and when that happened it would eclipse what-T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
4 5
ever else it was that she liked about him. Could Cat really be in love with him? Isabel thought it was unlikely, as she detected a sensitivity to his faults—the eyes cast ever so slightly upwards, for example—whenever he made a remark which embarrassed her. We are not embarrassed by those we love; we may experience passing discomfort, but it is never embarrassment in the true sense. We forgive them their shortcomings, or we may just never notice them. And she had forgiven John Liamor, of course, even when she had found him one night with a student in his rooms at the college, a girl who giggled and wrapped herself in his dis-carded shirt, while John merely looked out the window and said,
“Bad timing, Liamor.”
It might be simpler, she reflected, not to allow oneself to be in love with anybody; just to be oneself, immune to hurt from others.
There were plenty of people like that who seemed content with their lives—or were they? She wondered how many of these people were solitary by choice, and how many were alone because nobody had ever come into their lives and relieved them of their loneliness. There was a difference between resignation, or acceptance, in the face of loneliness and choosing to be solitary.
The central mystery, of course, was why we needed to be in love at all. The reductionist answer was that it was simply a matter of biology, and that love provided the motivational force that encouraged people to stay together to raise children. Like all the arguments of evolutionary psychology, it looked so simple and so obvious, but if that was all that we were, then why did we fall in love with ideas, and things, and places? Auden had captured this potential in pointing out that as a boy he had fallen in love with a pumping engine, and thought it “every bit as beautiful as you.”
Displacement, the sociobiologists would say; and there was the old Freudian joke that tennis is a substitute for sex. To which 4 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h there was only one reply: that sex could equally well
